Me: So game, why is my steam refuelling cell not working?
Game: A vole ate your regolith
Me: So you’re telling me all those times I wanted a vole to eat regolith they didn’t but the one time I don’t want them to eat it they do?
Game: Welcome to Klei Entertainment, baby.
Oxygen Not Included: The Kerbal Space Program of base building & what Fallout Shelter should've been
I forgot to ask, why the 230 C limit? (Sorry for all the little questions, but there’s so much to learn about this game and you clearly know a lot.)
Holy shit! The voles are out to get me. One of them excreted regolith on my power transformer that closes my bunker doors. JUST as a meteor swarm was detected!
It’s a Conspiracy of Voles led by their shadowy leader, Vole Du Mort.
Finished a few pieces of automation. I’ve set my bunker doors to stay open until the last moment. My detection quality is 80s, and it takes 45s seconds for the doors to close, so after a meteor shower is detected the doors can stay open for 35s. I’ve marked it down to 30s just to add a safety margin. I can increase it as my network quality improves. This lets my solar panels operate as long as possible (ignoring those few seconds). What I don’t understand is why one of my scanners is only 67% quality. There’s nothing any remotely close to it. Oh well.
I’ve also finished my mission control timer setup. So now it all happens automatically. The launch prep is completed. This turns on main power to the launch facility, opens the bay doors and retracts the gantry. It also initiates a timer. 45s seconds later the bay doors are open and a launch command is sent to the rocket. This initiates two other timers. The first closes the bay doors after 10 seconds. The second timer is a mission timer and it a series of buffers that amount to 2.6 cycles. At that time, the bay doors are opened for the returning rocket. At some point I’m going to make the mission timer configurable by using switches. But for now it is fine.
Automated launching and recovery of rockets! Yay!
No! Not Vole Du Mort!
Well, this game is over. I better restart. Damn.
I’m happy to answer! Good questions help me refine my own ways of thinking.
The 230 C limit is actually for efficiency. When I first started building these, I thought I needed some overheat protection, so I put in a thermostat for that reason. However, I later realized that the turbine can remove almost an arbitrary amount of heat: no matter what the input temperature, the output water is 95 C. So the steam can get very hot indeed before overheating. The steel aquatuner does have to stay below 325 C, but it’ll never get that hot even when running full blast with supercoolant.
This wastes heat, though. The turbine has a max of 850 W output power, which it reaches with only 200 C input (if all 5 ports are unblocked). I bumped this to 230 C for a little extra cooling, but I could have kept it at 200 C exactly. Putting in the limit does mean the aquatuner isn’t running 100% of the time, so it won’t cool as quickly, but it’s so powerful that I really don’t mind.
So if you’re looking for maximum power efficiency, set the steam thermostat to 200 C. For maximum cooling capacity, you can leave it off and it should never overheat (assuming just one aquatuner). Of course, at a certain point you should just add a second turbine.
Is there anyway to automate getting all the oxylite dropped by my dense pufts??? It evaporates away if I’m not looking.
Nevermind. Sweepers. Duh.
I fear what will happen as soon as I say this, but I think I’m becoming not entirely awful at this game. 
Having water on the bottom of their ranch works too.
Good idea! There’s no danger of them drowning?
I think I’ve finally perfected my oxygen liquifier.
As usual, the simpler the better. No heat conduction tiles or anything. I just run the supercoolant through radiant pipes directly in the LOX chamber. I can pump the oxygen in at full speed and it liquifies immediately. I wonder if it’ll keep up with two full pipes of oxygen… but that’s really overkill.
Visco-gel has really helped out here. I didn’t use it before for some reason. It’s super helpful in isolating the atmospheres in two areas; in particular, maintaining a vacuum on one side with a normal atmosphere on the other. I have to be careful putting the supercoolant chamber in a vacuum since it gets really cold–if it liquifies the surrounding gases, it’ll try to pump that instead of the supercoolant and break the pipes. But I also wanted to keep the chamber small; too small for a gas pump. So I pumped down the surroundings and used visco-gel to be the door. It’s great stuff!
Congratulations! I almost have the petroleum rocket researched along with liquid fuel and solid oxidizer. Still some ways to go before I need LOX.
I just learnt something new. Puft Princes increase the chances of getting the high quality Dense and Squeaky Pufts. So while a bunch of these guys are awful (due to the poor conversion rates) having one in your Puft ranch is invaluable.
This is how I feel when my Dupes do something incredibly dumb.
I’m having some bizarre issues with my meteor shower detector. It closes the bunker doors, then as soon as they close it flips signals and reopens then, then closes them and keeps them closed.
But it had been worked for a couple of hundred cycles and I haven’t changed anything except moving the bunker doors higher. It is very strange. And very annoying because meteors are getting through during the cycling and damaging the base. Grrr!
It appears that if the meteor shower arrived while the buffer was still counting down then the logic got messed up. I’m still not quite sure how or why, but one of the scanner would suddenly change signals and open the gates. After tweaking the buffer time (I had lost some network quality) it was back to working. It could be a bug because the logic itself is correct.
It happened again that my doors opened on me. It is definitely caused by the doors closing and one of the scanners losing track of the shower for just a split second. So I added buffers to all of my scanners. Problem solved (so far).
Interesting–good find. To be honest, I don’t use the scanners at all. I still haven’t figured out a bulletproof method of dealing with regolith, so mainly I still handle all the bunker door stuff by hand.
Maybe I should give it another shot, though–I have better ideas now about how to deal with the heat, and I’d like to try out solar power.
One bug I’ve run across a few times is that sometimes regolith will turn into a weird indestructible tile. Neither my dupes nor robo-miners can mine it. So far it’s fixed itself when I reload, but it’s kinda annoying and will interfere with an automated solar/scanner setup.